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Human Cloning: Embryos
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Cloning involves the creation of an embryo which is an identical copy of another human being. Clones can be created through dividing an embryo at its earliest stage (creating two identical embryos). They can ... be created using Cell Nuclear Replacement, the technique used to create Dolly the Sheep in 1997.
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Stillman and Hall, rather than cloning humans, actually just performed the first artificial twinning using human embryos. A similar procedure has been performed in mice successfully for twenty years and in cattle for ten years. Identical twins are produced when a fertilized egg divides for the first time and instead of remaining as one organism, actually splits into two independent cells. Stillman and Hall were able to achieve this same effect by removing the protective layer around the developing embryo (zona pellucida), splitting the cells apart, and replacing the outer coating with an artificial shell.
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Michael West, president of Advanced Cell Technology, says the mechanics of cloning a human would be fairly simple. First, you would remove all the DNA from a female egg, turning it into essentially a container. Next, you would replace the DNA with the cell from a finger of the person to be cloned. And with some electrical prompting, the cell would divide into a human embryo, which would be implanted in a surrogate mother and carried to term, producing a genetic duplicate, or identical twin of the person who donated the cell, a brand new-way of engineering a baby.
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During the debate on Brownback's amendment to the insurance bill that would ban the patenting of human embryos, Sen. Arlen Specter, R.-Pa., a strong supporter of experimental human cloning, was assigned to man the floor for the pro-cloning side. But when Specter was forced to leave the floor for 30 seconds to take a telephone call, cloning opponent Sen. John Ensign, R.-Nev., seized the unusual opportunity of an open floor to effectively lock in Brownback's amendment as the pending business. Because no one was present to object, Ensign's maneuver made a vote on cloning almost inevitable.
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Britain believed that it had a law that prevented human cloning. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act of 1990 (HFEA) requires that activities that fall within the HFEA -- such as the creation, storage, handling and use of human embryos -- may be undertaken only if they explicitly fall within the law or are approved by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. The HFEA defines an ³embryo² as a "live human embryo where fertilisation is complete" or "an egg in the process of fertilisation." Parliament assumed that because cloning to create a human embryo did not fall within the law, such conduct was prohibited.
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Among Members who disapprove of cloning-for-biomedical-research, most oppose it permanently because they think it is immoral to create human embryos for purposes that are foreign to the embryos' own well-being and that necessarily require their destruction. Others oppose such cloning permanently because they hold that society (and not only the embryos) will suffer irreversible moral harm by crossing the boundary that allows nascent human life routinely to be treated as a natural resource. Some Members oppose permitting the practice because they fear that it will greatly increase the likelihood that cloning-to-produce-children will occur or because they think that a law banning only the transfer of a cloned embryo into a woman's uterus would be unenforceable. Some Members oppose the practice ... because they think that the scientific case for proceeding has not yet met the burden of showing why this research is necessary and of sufficient importance to justify crossing the moral barrier of creating nascent human life for the purpose of experimentation.
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Embryos